Stalin and His Hangmen Quotes

“Do you understand the game you’re playing? Or are you, just like us, prostituting your feelings, conscience, duty? But then we shall never forgive you for that, never ever. . . .30”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“At home you set up various committees to save victims of fascism, you assemble antiwar congresses, you make libraries of books burned by Hitler, all very well. But why do we not see you acting to save victims of our Soviet fascism, run by Stalin? . . . Personally we fear that in a year or two the failed seminary student Iosif Jughashvili (Stalin) will not be satisfied by the title of world-class philosopher and will demand, like Nebuchadnezzar, to be called at the very least the “sacred bull.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“As the congress began, OGPU found nine copies of an anonymous leaflet addressed to foreign delegates, apparently composed by a group of Soviet writers: . . . We Russian writers remind one of prostitutes in a brothel, with just one difference, that they trade their bodies and we trade our souls; just as they have no way out of the brothel, except death by starvation, neither have we. . . .”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Stalin had always found Gorky unreliable; he had crossed swords with him in 1917, calling his protests “geese cackling in intellectual marshes,”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“We have to re-examine our policy on letting people go abroad— and visas. . . .24”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“a holiday—as a party line, as a policy, as a declaration. That would mean giving in to capitalist enterprise, philistinism, tending to the denial of Bolshevism, this would be the triumph of Trotskyism and a surrender of positions. To counteract these moods we must re-examine our practice, our methods and get rid of whatever might feed such moods. This means that we (the GPU) have perhaps to be a bit quieter, more modest, resort to searches and arrests more cautiously, with better evidence. . . .”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“passed the letter to Menzhinsky with his own commentary: We have to take account of such moods in the Central Committee’s ruling circles, and pause for thought. It would be a very great political mistake if in principle the party on the question of the GPU were to surrender to the philistines and give”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“bad feelings to you personally or the GPU as an institution....”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Dear Feliks . . . I consider that we must as soon as possible move to a more “liberal” form of Soviet rule: fewer repressions, more legality, more discussion, more self-rule (under the party’s guidance naturaliter [Bukharin liked to use Latin]), etc. . . . That is why I sometimes speak out against proposals to widen the rights of the GPU, etc. Understand, dear Feliks (you know how much I love you) that you have no reasons whatsoever to suspect me of any”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“A real blow to OGPU came from Bukharin in autumn 1924:”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“The performance is over.”
The audience got up.
“It’s time to put on your fur coats and go home.”
They looked round.
But it turned out that there were no fur coats and no homes.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“best evoked in The Apocalypse of Our Time by the philosopher Vasili Rozanov in 1919, who had died that same year of emaciation in the Troitse-Sergeev monastery: La divina Commedia
With clanking screeching an iron curtain is lowered over Russian
History.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Any measures whatsoever must be officially announced only by Comrade Kalinin—never under any circumstances may Comrade Trotsky make any public statements in print or any other way.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Therefore I come to the inevitable conclusion that it is now that we must give the most decisive and merciless battle to the obscurantist clergy and crush its resistance with such cruelty that they won’t forget it for several decades.17 On only one point was Lenin sensitive: he feared an anti-Semitic backlash if Jews were seen to be running this “pogrom in reverse” against Russian Christians, so an ethnic Russian had to be nominally in charge of crushing the Church.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“A clever writer on political questions [Machiavelli] rightly said that if it is necessary for the realization of a political goal to go for a series of atrocities, then they must be carried out in the most energetic way and in the shortest time, for the popular masses will not endure prolonged application of atrocities. . . .”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Lenin supported extreme measures. On March 19, 1922, he wrote to the Politburo: . . . the only moment when we can smash the enemy’s head with a 99 percent chance of success . . . Now and only now, when there is cannibalism in the famine areas and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are lying on the roads, we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of Church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy, not stopping at the crushing of any resistance. . . .”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“In the Cheka and the party, Lenin feared, Jewish brains were as much a drawback as an advantage, and the Jews themselves were only too aware of the backlash they might provoke. Lenin took care to see that Trotsky’s name was removed from the commission set up to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“In the traditional Russian and Nazi definition of Jewishness, where parentage and surname counts as much as religious and cultural affiliation, such a view is plausible. But what was Jewish except lineage about Bolsheviks like Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev, or Sverdlov? Some were second- or even third-generation renegades; few even spoke Yiddish, let alone knew Hebrew.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Not all chekisty were men. In the Crimea Stalin’s Baku comrade Rozalia Zemliachka and her lover Béla Kun, with Lenin’s approval, murdered 50,000 White officers who had trusted Commander Frunze’s safe conduct. Zemliachka, a Cheka sadist who would live to enjoy a pension, tied the officers in pairs to planks and burned them alive in furnaces, or drowned them in barges that she sank offshore.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“And then with an expansive Russian song
They returned home to town.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“They read denunciations, certificates, cases.
They hurriedly signed sentences.
They yawned. They drank wine.
[ . . . ]
At night they chased barefooted, naked people
Over ice-covered stones
Against a northeast wind
Into wastelands outside town.
[ . . . ]
They threw them, not all killed yet, into a pit.
They hurriedly covered them with earth.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Than the crunch of broken lives and bones.
This is why when our eyes are languid
And passion begins to seethe stormily in the breast,
I want to write on your sentence
One unquavering thing: “Up against a wall! Shoot!” 23”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“In 1921, in newly conquered Tbilisi, the chekisty published an anthology, The Cheka’s Smile. The contribution by Aleksandr Eiduk, executioner and roving military emissary, ran: There is no greater joy, not better music”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“piles of underpants, shirts and outer clothing. . . . Three men were shooting like robots, their eyes were empty, with a cadaverous glassy shine. . . .”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Chekisty with smoking revolvers ran back and cocked the triggers immediately. The legs of those shot jerked in convulsions. . . . Two men in grey greatcoats nimbly put nooses round the necks of the corpses, dragged them off to a dark niche in the cellar. Two others with spades dug at the earth, directing steaming rivulets of blood. Solomin, his revolver in his belt, sorted out the linen of those shot. He carefully made separate”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“Vladimir Zazubrin, in 1918 a deserter from the White forces and later a lively writer of fiction and memoirs, shot by Stalin in 1938 for his frankness, recalled the hard life of the Cheka executioners: White, grey carcasses (undressed people) collapsed onto the floor.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“It can be seen as being between Jewish inter-nationalists and the remnants of a Russian national culture.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“in 1918–21 by Jews against Russians as simply redressing the balance after centuries of Tsarist oppression. One might compare it to the violence in 1947–48 of the Stern gang and Irgun in Israel against Arab inhabitants and British rulers, an explosion of self-assertion after a far worse persecution. The motivation of those Jews who worked for the Cheka was not Zionist or ethnic. The war between the Cheka and the Russian bourgeoisie was not even purely a war of classes or political factions.”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“The prominent role of Jews in the killings of 1918–21 is a very thorny question, if only because one has to share debating ground with Russian chauvinists and plain anti-Semites.18 From Trotsky down to the executioners of Odessa, Russia’s Jews ruthlessly avenged the victims of a century’s pogroms, and the perceived Jewishness of the Cheka, in the minds of not just anti-Semitic fascists but even otherwise fair-minded Russian monarchists and liberals, reflected a widespread view of the Bolshevik party and its Central Committee as a Jewish cabal. We cannot dismiss the upsurge of violence”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

“under constant fear of enemy attack. 16”
― Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him